How To Wield Influence and Sell Weaponry in Washington

When it comes to the art of the deal, at least where arms sales are concerned,
American presidents, their administrations, and the Pentagon have long been
Trumpian in nature. Their role has been to beat the drums (of war) for
the major American weapons makers and it’s been a highly profitable and
successful activity. In 2015, for instance, the U.S. once again took the
top
spot in global weapons sales, $40 billion dollars of them, or a staggering
50.2% of the world market. (Russia came in a distant third with $11.2
billion in sales.) The U.S. also topped
sales of weaponry to developing nations. In these years, Washington
has, in fact, peddled the products of those arms makers to at
least 100 countries, a staggering figure if you stop a moment to think about
the violence on this planet. Internationally, in other words, the U.S.
has always been an open-carry nation.

Donald Trump has, however, changed this process in one obvious way. He’s
shoved the president’s role as arms-purveyor-in-chief in everybody’s
face. He did so on his initial trip abroad when, in Riyadh, he braggedceaselessly about ringing up $110 billion dollars in arms sales to
the Saudis. Some of those had, in fact, already been brokered by the Obama administration
and some weren’t actually “sales” at all, just “letters
of intent.” Still, he took the most fulsome of credit and, when
it comes to his “achievements,” exaggeration is, of course, the name of his
game.

And he’s just done it again on his blustery jaunt through Japan and South
Korea. There, using
the North Korean threat, he plugged
American weaponry mercilessly (so to speak), while claiming potential deals
and future American jobs galore. In the presence of Shinzo Abe, for instance,
he swore
that the Japanese Prime Minister would “shoot [North Korean missiles] out of
the sky when he completes the purchase of a lot of military equipment from the
United States.” Both the Japanese and the South Korean leaders, seeing a way
into his well-armored heart, humored him relentlessly on the subject and on
his claims of bringing home jobs to the U.S. (In fact, one of the weapons
systems he was plugging, the
F-35, would actually be assembled in Japan!)

Strangely enough, however, the president didn’t bring up an issue he raises
regularly when it comes to weapons sales in the United States (at least, sales
to white people, not Muslims, with an urge to kill): mental
health. Isn’t it curious that, as he peddles some of the more destructive
weaponry imaginable across Asia and the Middle East, he never brings that up?
Fortunately, TomDispatch
regular and expert on American arms sales William Hartung raises the issue
today in an adaptation of a piece he wrote for Sleepwalking
to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation, a book just published
by the New Press. You might say that he considers the most mentally unnerving
aspect of American arms sales: the way, since the 1950s, the nuclear lobby has
sold planet-destroying weaponry of every sort to presidents, the Pentagon, and
Congress. And if that doesn’t represent a disturbing mental health record of
the first order, what does? ~ Tom

Massive Overkill Brought to You By the Nuclear-Industrial
Complex By William D. Hartung

Until recently, few of us woke up worrying about the threat of nuclear war.
Such dangers seemed like Cold War relics, associated with outmoded practices
like building fallout shelters and “duck
and cover” drills.

But give Donald Trump credit. When it comes to nukes, he’s gotten
our attention. He’s prompted renewed concern, if not outright alarm,
about the possibility that such weaponry could actually be used for the first
time since the 6th
and 9th
of August 1945. That’s what happens when the man in the Oval Office
begins
threatening to rain “fire and fury like the world has never seen”
on another country or, as he did in his presidential campaign, claiming
cryptically that, when it comes to nuclear weapons, “the devastation
is very important to me.”

Trump’s pronouncements are at least as unnerving as President Ronald
Reagan’s infamous “joke”
that “we begin bombing [the Soviet Union] in five minutes” or
the comment
of a Reagan aide that, “with enough shovels,” the United States
could survive a superpower nuclear exchange.

Whether in the 1980s or today, a tough-guy attitude on nuclear weapons, when
combined with an apparent ignorance about their world-ending potential, adds
up to a toxic brew. An unprecedented global anti-nuclear movement –
spearheaded by the European
Nuclear Disarmament campaign and, in the United States, the Nuclear
Freeze campaign – helped turn President Reagan around, so much so that
he later agreed
to substantial nuclear cuts and acknowledged
that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

It remains to be seen whether anything could similarly influence Donald Trump.
One thing is certain, however: the president has plenty of nuclear weapons
to back up his aggressive rhetoric – more than 4,000
of them in the active U.S. stockpile, when a mere handful of them could obliterate
North Korea at the cost of millions
of lives. Indeed, a few hundred nuclear warheads could do the same
for even the largest of nations and those 4,000, if ever used, could essentially
destroy the planet.

In other words, in every sense of the term, the U.S. nuclear arsenal already
represents overkill on an almost unimaginable scale. Independent experts
from U.S. war colleges suggest
that about 300 warheads would be more than enough to deter any country from
launching a nuclear attack on the United States.

Despite this, Donald Trump is all in (and more) on the Pentagon’s plan
– developed
under Barack Obama – to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers,
submarines, and missiles, as well as new generations of warheads to go with
them. The cost of this “modernization”
program? The Congressional Budget Office recently pegged it at $1.7
trillion over the next three decades, adjusted for inflation. As Derek
Johnson, director of the antinuclear organization Global Zero, has noted,
“That’s money we don’t have for an arsenal we don’t
need.”

Building a Nuclear Complex

Why the desire for so many nukes? There is, in fact, a dirty little
secret behind the massive U.S. arsenal: it has more to do with the power and
profits of this country’s major weapons makers than it does with any
imaginable strategic considerations.

It may not surprise you to learn that there’s nothing new about the
influence the nuclear weapons lobby has over Pentagon spending priorities.
The successful machinations of the makers of strategic bombers and intercontinental
ballistic missiles, intended to keep taxpayer dollars flowing their way, date
back to the dawn of the nuclear age and are the primary reason President Dwight
D. Eisenhower coined the term “military-industrial
complex” and warned of its dangers in his 1961 farewell address.

Without the development of such weapons, that complex simply would not exist
in the form it does today. The Manhattan
Project, the vast scientific-industrial endeavor that produced the first
such weaponry during World War II, was one of the largest government-funded
research and manufacturing projects in history. Today’s nuclear
warhead complex is still largely built around facilities and locations
that date back to that time.

The Manhattan Project was the first building block of the permanent arms
establishment that came to rule Washington. In addition, the nuclear
arms race against that other superpower of the era, the Soviet Union, was
crucial to the rationale for a permanent war state. In those years,
it was the key to sustaining the building, funding, and institutionalizing
of the arms establishment.

As Eisenhower noted in that farewell address of his, “a permanent arms
industry of vast proportions” had developed for a simple enough reason.
In a nuclear age, America had to be ready ahead of time. As he put it,
“We can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense.”
And that was for a simple enough reason: in an era of potential nuclear war,
any society could be destroyed in a matter of hours. There would be
no time, as in the past, to mobilize or prepare after the fact.

In addition, there were some very specific ways in which the quest for more
nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles drove Eisenhower to give that farewell
address. One of his biggest fights was over whether to build a new nuclear
bomber. The Air Force and the arms industry were desperate to do so.
Eisenhower thought it a waste
of money, given all the other nuclear delivery vehicles the U.S. was building
at the time. He even cancelled the bomber, only to find himself forced
to revive it under immense pressure from the arms lobby. In the process,
he lost the larger struggle to rein in the nation’s nuclear buildup
and corral the burgeoning military-industrial complex.

At the same time, there were rumblings in the intelligence community, the
military establishment, the media, and Congress about a “missile gap”
with the Soviet Union. The notion was that Moscow had somehow jumped
ahead of the United States in developing and building intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs). There was no definitive intelligence to substantiate the
claim (and it was later proved to be false). However, a wave of worst-case
scenarios leaked by or promoted by intelligence analysts and eagerly backed
by industry propaganda made that missile gap part of the everyday news of
the time.

Such fears were then exaggerated
further, thanks to hawkish journalists of the era like Joseph Alsop and prominent
Democratic senators like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, as well as Stuart
Symington, who just happened to be a friend and former colleague of an executive
at the aircraft manufacturing company Convair, which, in turn, just happened
to make ICBMs. As a result, he lobbied
hard on behalf of a Pentagon plan to build more of that corporation’s
Atlas ballistic missiles, while Kennedy would famously make the nonexistent
missile gap a central theme of his successful 1960 campaign for the presidency.

Eisenhower couldn’t have been more clear-eyed about all of this.
He saw
the missile gap for the fiction it was or, as he put it, a “useful piece
of political demagoguery” for his opponents. “Munitions makers,”
he insisted,
“are making tremendous efforts towards getting more contracts and in
fact seem to be exerting undue influence over the Senators.”

Once Kennedy took office, it became all too apparent that there was no
missile gap, but by then it hardly mattered. The damage had been done.
Billions of dollars more were flowing into the nuclear-industrial complex
to build up an American arsenal of ICBMs already unmatched on the planet.

The techniques that the arms lobby and its allies in government used more
than half a century ago to promote sky-high nuclear weapons spending continue
to be wielded to this day. The twenty-first-century arms complex employs
tools of influence that Kennedy and his compatriots would have found familiar
indeed – including millions
of dollars in campaign contributions that flow to members of Congress
and the continual employment
of 700 to 1,000 lobbyists to influence them. At certain moments, in other
words, there have been nearly two arms lobbyists for every member of Congress.
Much of this sort of activity remains focused on ensuring that nuclear weapons
of all types are amply financed and that the funding for the new generations
of the bombers, submarines, and missiles that will deliver them stays on track.

When traditional lobbying methods don’t get the job done, the industry’s
argument of last resort is jobs – in particular, jobs in the states and districts
of key members of Congress. This process is aided by the fact that nuclear
weapons facilities are spread remarkably widely across
the country. There are nuclear weapons labs in California and New
Mexico; a nuclear weapons testing and research site in Nevada; a nuclear warhead
assembly and disassembly plant in Texas; a factory in Kansas City, Missouri,
that builds nonnuclear parts for such weapons; and a plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
that enriches uranium for those same weapons. There are factories or
bases for ICBMs, bombers, and ballistic missile submarines in Connecticut,
Georgia, Washington State, California, Ohio, Massachusetts, Louisiana, North
Dakota, and Wyoming. Such a nuclear geography ensures that a striking number
of congressional representatives will automatically favor more spending on
nuclear weapons.

In reality, the jobs argument is deeply flawed. As the experts know,
virtually any other activity into which such funding flowed would create significantly
more jobs than Pentagon spending. A study
by economists at the University of Massachusetts, for example, found infrastructure
investment would create one and one-half times as many jobs as Pentagon funding
and education spending twice as many.

In most cases it hasn’t seemed to matter that the jobs claims for weapons
spending are grotesquely exaggerated and better alternatives litter the landscape.
The argument remains remarkably potent in states and communities that are
particularly dependent on the Pentagon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, members
of Congress from such areas are disproportionately represented on the committees
that decide how much will be spent on nuclear and conventional weaponry.

A Field Guide to Influencing Nuclear Thinking in Washington

Another way the nuclear weapons industry (like the rest of the military-industrial
complex) tries to control and focus public debate is by funding hawkish, right-wing
think tanks. The advantage to weapons makers is that those institutions
and their associated “experts” can serve as front groups for the
complex, while posing as objective policy analysts. Think of it as an intellectual
version of money laundering.

One of the most effective industry-funded
think tanks in terms of promoting costly, ill-advised policies has undoubtedly
been Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. In 1983, when
President Ronald Reagan first
announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (which soon gained the nickname
“Star Wars”), the high-tech space weapons system that was either
meant to defend the country against a future Soviet first strike or – depending
on how you looked at it – free the country to use its nuclear weapons without
fear of being attacked, Gaffney was its biggest booster. More recently,
he has become a prominent
purveyor of Islamophobia, but the impact of his promotional work for Star
Wars continues to be felt in contracts for future weaponry to this day.

He had served in the Reagan-era Pentagon, but left because even that administration
wasn’t anti-Soviet enough for his tastes, once the president and his
advisers began to discuss things like reducing nuclear weapons in Europe.
It didn’t take him long to set
up his center with funding from Boeing, Lockheed, and other defense contractors.

Another key industry-backed think tank in the nuclear policy field is the
National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP).
It released a report
on nuclear weapons policy just as George W. Bush was entering the White House
that would be adopted almost wholesale by his administration for its first
key nuclear posture review. It advocated such things as increasing the
number of countries targeted by the country’s nuclear arsenal and building
a new, more “usable,” bunker-busting nuke. At that time,
NIPP had
an executive from Boeing on its board and its director was Keith Payne.
He would become infamous in the annals of nuclear policy for co-authoring
a 1980
article at Foreign Policy entitled “Victory Is Possible,”
suggesting that the United States could actually win a nuclear war, while
“only” losing 30 million to 40 million people. This is the
kind of expert the nuclear weapons complex chose to fund to promulgate its
views.

Then there is the Lexington
Institute, the think tank that never met a weapons system it didn’t
like. Their key front man, Loren Thompson, is frequently quoted in news
stories on defense issues. It is rarely pointed out that he is funded
by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other nuclear weapons contractors.

And these are just a small sampling of Washington’s research and advocacy
groups that take money from weapons contractors, ranging from organizations
on the right like the Heritage
Foundation to Democratic-leaning outfits like the Center
for a New American Security, co-founded by former Obama administration
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy
(who was believed to have the inside track on being appointed secretary of
defense had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election).

And you may not be surprised to learn that Donald Trump is no piker when
it comes to colluding with the weapons industry. His strong preference
for populating his administration with former arms industry executives is
so blatant that Senator John McCain recently pledged
to oppose any new nominees with industry ties. Examples of Trump’s
industry-heavy administration include Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a
former board member at General Dynamics; White House Chief of Staff John Kelly,
who worked for a number of defense firms and was an adviser to DynCorp, a
private security firm that has done everything from (poorly) training the
Iraqi police to contracting with the Department of Homeland Security; former
Boeing executive and now Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan; former
Lockheed Martin executive John Rood, nominated as undersecretary of defense
for policy; former Raytheon Vice President Mark Esper, newly confirmed as
secretary of the Army; Heather Wilson, a former consultant to Lockheed Martin,
who is secretary of the Air Force; Ellen Lord, a former CEO for the aerospace
company Textron, who is undersecretary of defense for acquisition; and National
Security Council Chief of Staff Keith Kellogg, a former employee of the major
defense and intelligence contractor CACI, where he dealt with “ground
combat systems” among other things. And keep in mind that these
high-profile industry figures are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes
to the corporate revolving
door that has for decades been installed in the Pentagon (as documented
by Lee Fang of the Intercept in a story
from early in Trump’s tenure).

Given the composition of his national security team and Trump’s love
of all things nuclear, what can we expect from his administration on the nuclear
weapons front? As noted, he has already signed on to the Pentagon’s
budget-busting $1.7 trillion nuclear build-up and his impending
nuclear posture review seems to include proposals for dangerous new weapons
like a “low-yield,” purportedly more usable nuclear warhead.
He’s spoken privately with his national security team about expanding
the American nuclear arsenal in a staggering fashion, the equivalent of a
ten-fold
increase. He’s wholeheartedly embraced
missile defense spending, pledging to put billions of dollars more into that
already overfunded, under-producing set of programs. And of course,
he is assiduously trying to undermine the Iran nuclear deal, one of the most
effective arms control agreements of recent times, and so threatening
to open the door to a new nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Unless the nuclear spending spree long in the making and now being pushed
by President Trump as the best thing since the invention of golf is stopped
thanks to public opposition, the rise of an antinuclear movement, or Congressional
action, we’re in trouble. And of course, the nuclear weapons lobby
will once again have won the day, just as it did almost 60 years ago, despite
the opposition of a popular president and decorated war hero. And needless
to say, Donald Trump, “bone
spurs” and all, is no Dwight D. Eisenhower.